After the Fireplace
by MoreThingsInHeavenAndEarth
Summary: A little exploration of The Doctor and Rose. I know, I know, another GITF fic, stop flogging the dead donkey: Please read:


I realise this has been done to death, but I'm using this particular peice to practise some new skills, so please excuse the dead donkey subject. [set after girl in the fireplace]  
Just to make something clear, i LOVE the doctor, i really do, but sometimes i think that he can be slightly... arrogant, and take his companians for granted sometimes, esp. Rose and Martha, so, that's a little bit of what i was trying to explore here.

DISCLAIMER: Dont own DoctorWho.

Enjoy! Or laugh at!

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The ends of the universe had never scared her enough to leave him, the aliens had never scared her enough to leave him, but _he_ had left _her_, and that had scared her. Perhaps it had scared her enough to leave him.

It had scared her enough to have her running for the room she stayed in, pulling everything out of drawers and cupboards and shoving it into the one suitcase she brought, the wires from her curling tongs becoming entwined around her legs like vines round an ugly, forgotten castle until she crumbled. She fell onto the bed, pulling the duvet around her like a moth in its chrysalis, waiting for the spring to burst into her beauty.

The Doctor had been her spring, bringing her into the light of living, showing her how wonderful she could really be. She had trusted him, trusted him to make her feel safe and special, and never to leave her, and tonight he had smashed that trust, smashed it like the mirror. This made her angry, and the more she thought about it, the angrier she became, until she was boiling over with it, the petulant rage spilling into every corner of the room, until she was ready to throw it at him, say the worst things she could so maybe he could understand a tiny portion of what he'd just done to her.

Enter Stage Right: The Doctor. He looked a little sad, and he looked a little lonely, and maybe he'd come to find some comfort, but Rose didn't really care, her anger was such as to eclipse her humanity completely, so when she stumbled out of the duvet she was almost glowing with it. It was dark in her room, and to The Doctor she was an inky outline of shadows and the slight, pearlescent film that shone off her skin giving her a strange, moon-like quality.

She switched the light on.

It was bright, and sent them both blinking for a moment, dark spots floating in front of them so it was hard to see. By the time she had regained the use of her eyes, he had sat down on her bed, still crumpled with tortured thoughts; her just-washed laundry tumbled in with the sheets. That's what got her the most, that he dared sit on _her_ bed, the lacy hem of _her_ pink knickers resting underneath his left hand, his uninvited intimacy, that he expected to slot back into Before, when it was so clearly After.

"What are you doing?" she stood, incensed, her hands on her hips.

A look of confusion strolled onto his face, not familiar with this side of her, especially not when he had come expecting compassion and sympathy. This was, perhaps, the problem; he had come to expect this from her, that she would always be here to listen to his babbling and sooth his pain. He opened his mouth and tried to search for an answer, but couldn't find one which, even he realised, wouldn't sound demeaning.

"Why are you here Doctor?" She curled her lip, scornfully, hatefully. "Is it because you knew that I would be waiting, ready to listen to _you_, or sit with you in _your_ silence, knowing who you're thinking about, knowing where you'd be if it wasn't for her being kind?"

"Rose..." He whispered it, making the familiar word sound the way only he could.

"NO! NO!" She smashed her fists through the air in frustration. "Don't you say that! Because I bet you said her name like that, I bet you made her feel like that! Is it inter-changeable, replace the letters and the face and we're all the same to you? Or was she really special? Was I an amusing distraction to pass the time between the wonderful, beautiful people you're used to?"

"Rose!" It was reproachful, the look on his face arrogantly wounded, and, if she had ever seen the film, would have reminded her of Henry Higgins in _My Fair Lady_.

"Did you laugh at me, when you were with her? Did you compare us, think how much more accomplished and clever she was? Did she get it when you talk about science, could you debate Tolstoy and Chekov with her?" She spat it out, the words hurtling through her, out of her, across from her until they hit their target, skidding at his feet. She pushed a lock of her hair off her forehead and smiled a smile so bitter, it made the Doctor smart to look at it. "Did she '_understand you_'"?

This last shot was so scathing it ripped him raw, and he reeled at the force of it against his chest. "Of course I didn't..."

"Really? Why not? I expect you would have found it fun." It wasn't true, it was cruel and low, but she couldn't stop herself from saying it, these things that would destroy him. She leant against a wall, crossing her arms over her chest, panting slightly from her shouting. She had put the ball in his court for a moment.

It sat there, heavy and uncomfortable while he struggled to catch up with the turn of events. "I would never have done that. I didn't think of it like that, it wasn't anything like that, she wasn't like that. It wasn't like a choice."

Rose clenched her jaw and let her head knock the wall. She raised one knee so she had a little support and turned her head to face away from him. "So then, Doctor, why did you choose her over me?"

He was stunned. Totally taken aback, surprised she has thought this, and, more importantly, said it.

"When you broke the mirror to save her, you left me. Anything could have happened and you couldn't save me, because you saved her instead." Her voice was ribbon-soft, weaving through his mind, and it tasted like poison. "A choice."

Put it like that and that's exactly what it was, a choice. A rash choice, a hot choice, but, a decision had been made. "I'm sorry." The two most pathetic words in the English language, he knew, they came out thick like treacle, oozing across the empty air and making it full and sticky.

"You're sorry?" She raised her eyebrows in scorn. "What, precisely, are you sorry for, Doctor?"

_Women! _It was the oldest female trick, and he had no idea what she wanted to hear. "Well, I-I'm sorry f-for , for choosing her over you?" He made it a question.

"NO! No, don't be sorry for that! You can't choose who you fall in love with!" Tears had snuck up on her, unbidden they began to prick her eyes. "I should know," she muttered bitterly. "What I want you to be sorry for is abandoning me. You left me Doctor. You just... left me. Anything could have happened, but you'd moved on."

Realisation dawned visibly on his face, and along with it a kind of horror at himself. "Oh Rose, oh, I am sorry."

The tears were falling now, and they were a mixture of anger and fear and a helpless kind-of sadness. They skated down her face, across the vast expanse of cheek, ski-jumping from her chin. She turned away from him, trying desperately to hold herself together so she could fire her last piece of ammunition. "It was like you didn't care." Rose whispered it, but it was as loud as a shout, whistling its way across the room with the force of a bullet, causing a neat, precise hole in The Doctor.

In two strides he was behind her, so close that she was sure he would feel the hairs on the back of her neck. She could hear his heavy breathing, ragged and full of hurt. Slowly, Rose faced him.

If this had been a movie, Rose reflected, this would have been the point when he would seize her by the shoulders and kiss her as if he never wanted to stop, to show her just how much he cared, and then he would take her in his arms and whisper about how he loved her into her hair, and how he never would leave her again.

But.

But, but, but. But this was not a movie, but this was The Doctor, but this was Rose. And so he turned on his heel and left her in the howling prairie of loneliness and fear, angry words scattered all over the carpet.

Rose sat down on the floor with a bump of self-loathing and self-pity. She had been angry like that very few times in her life, it didn't suit her, it left her guilt-ridden for days, and she hated herself for only doing it to people she could trust would love her however far she pushed them. Her mother was one, always uncertain as to what she had done to upset her daughter, Mickey was another, because however awful the things were that she said or did to him, he would still be there when she called the next day, wanting to moan about whoever at work or chatter about what happened on the bus that morning.

And now The Doctor; this unknown quantity. Her rage had hit him like a storm; she had said things in her blindness, some which were true and others which were not. Would he be there when she left her room?

She curled up on the hard floor, her head pressed against the cold, unforgiving metal of the radiator and cried, the tears cutting across her face, carving, great, ugly rivulets in her flesh. She cried herself empty of anger, leaving lumps of guilt in her chest. She lay on the floor for what felt like eons, feeling the throb of engines on the cheek that pressed against the floor. She lay until she began to float out of herself, at which point she pushed herself up and sat back against the heater in the blue twilight.

Rose rested the heels of her hands on her forehead, pushing herself into blackness. In spite of Sarah Jane and Rennette, in-spite of the danger, in spite of the warnings she had been given, in spite of everything, she couldn't help but wish with all her heart that he would.

Stupid, wonderful, love.

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If you've made it to the end, Gold Star for you! If want to reveiw, please, please, please do :) They make me excessively happy


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